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An anonymous reader writes "Smithsonian Magazine has an article about one of the non-obvious effects of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: dead organisms are not decomposing correctly. 'According to a new study (abstract) published in Oecologia, decomposers—organisms such as microbes, fungi and some types of insects that drive the process of decay—have also suffered from the contamination. These creatures are responsible for an essential component of any ecosystem: recycling organic matter back into the soil. Issues with such a basic-level process, the authors of the study think, could have compounding effects for the entire ecosystem.' The scientists took bags of fallen leaves to various areas around Chernobyl and found that locations with more radiation caused the leaves to retain more than half of their original weight after almost a year. They're now beginning to worry that almost three decades of dead brush buildup is contributing to the area's fire risk, and a large fire could distribute radioactive material beyond Chernobyl's exclusion zone."

Go to other areas of Europe and Russia that have normal forest breakdown, grab some soil and dead leaves and spread them in select locations around Chernobyl. If the fungi and mold was damaged back when the radiation was really high it can be reseeded now that it's lower

I would have thought that the fact that the experiments with leaves brought there from elsewhere decaying slower demonstrate that merely bringing foreign organisms (the collected leaves are not sterile, of course) is not going to help.

They're not sterile but it's not merely one organism that attaches early to the leaf that is responsible for the decay. It's a collection of different organisms that each take their share of the organic matter for their own needs. Hence the note of various fungi and insects. Notably, a large part of plant root systems are often heavily intertwined with fungi which either directly or indirectly take part in the breakdown of organic matter around the plants. Hence, just dumping soil onto a new area might

Lets say there is a fire, the radioactive, dead plants burn, some of the radiation is diluted from the area, over time wouldn't that process cause plant and microbial life to eventually replenish itself in the area ?

Seems to me the natural process of living systems is to do exactly this, get the things that hamper living systems dilute enough to re-establish living systems...

I would have thought that the fact that the experiments with leaves brought there from elsewhere decaying slower demonstrate that merely bringing foreign organisms (the collected leaves are not sterile, of course) is not going to help.

It's a full set of organisms you need; if, for instance, the earthworms were missing, a few strips of sod (or waiting for 'foreign' worms to migrate in) would be effective, but a pile of leaves wouldn't.

"The results were telling. In the areas with no radiation, 70 to 90 percent of the leaves were gone after a year. But in places where more radiation was present, the leaves retained around 60 percent of their original weight."

TFA calls it suffering. I'm not sure that's the word I'd use to describe microbes, fungi, and insects failing to decompose. I mean, who is the author to say with authority the desires and emotions of these little creatures?

1. To undergo or feel pain or distress: The patient is still suffering.2. To sustain injury, disadvantage, or loss: One's health suffers from overwork. The business suffers from lack of capital. Pspahn's karma score has suffered since he became a pedantic arse.

I would have thought that the fact that the experiments with leaves brought there from elsewhere decaying slower demonstrate that merely bringing foreign organisms (the collected leaves are not sterile, of course) is not going to help.

The collected leaves are not sterile, but that isn't where the bulk of the organizes live. They live in the soil.The best thing to do is leave it alone and let organisms that are tolerant of radiation evolve.

Perhaps we have a solution to carbon sequestration!. (I kid of course).

Some long-lasting foods are made through the use of various types of radiation; UV light and gamma rays. These break up the DNA of bacteria and fungii which don't have advanced self-repair mechanisms like mammals.

Perhaps you should reference a map first. Chernobyl is one of the booby prizes the EU gets to keep, along with the Ukraine debt and the tens of thousands of neo-nazis. Of course as an 'applying' member of the EU Ukraine will no longer be able to do a middle man attack on the gas supplies between Russia and the EU when it comes to extorting reduced gas prices (that application might drag on quite a bit, seriously who Europe would want tens of thousands of neo-nazis, just the right mix to set of mass conflic

Every time I come on to one of these threads about radiation, usually dozens of very knowledgable people come on and say that this kind of radiation is less than a bannana, and therefore, safe. I can't imagine what could possibly be causing such observations of slowing decay. Maybe those scientists are part of the world coal-burning conspiracy who are trying to raise the earth's climate to make it more habitable for the aliens, and are spreading false stories to discredit that clean, clean, safe and relia

Not only this, but different areas (including differing microclimates) compost at different rates. The claim is meaningless unless they knew what the local rate was before the incident, AND to what degree it was accelerated by human activity (frex, foot traffic pulverizes dead leaves so they decompose faster).

Sounds like the perfect place to sell burial plots to the rich. Their corpses can remain intact for thousands of years. And the fear of radiation poisoning will keep grave robbers away. As a bonus, it will save more land from being developed into wasted space. And this land that can't be used by the living will become useful as well. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Or....to Kremlin criminal bosses. The Ukraine ought to offer Tsar Putin a final resting place, cheap. And he'll remain there to inspire the faithful since he won't decay very well. Hell, they could even promise to put up one of those Lenin "I-Just-Cut-One-for-the-Proles" statues. Instead of striding forcefully into the future, they could give him a tail and tuck it between his legs in a galloping romp headed back towards Mother Russia. Who knew she was really a Mother-in-Law?

Chernobyl was a fission plant. Mankind has yet to create a viable fusion power plant. And even if we were able to make a fusion plant, it would be impossible for a fusion reactor to "go critical" since "criticality" is not even a concept applicable to fusion reactions.

Because nature has shit loads of fusion reactors all over the planet that go critical all the time.

Actually, that's not all that far off from reality. Except that, in our solar system, nature has only one fusion reactor, which went critical roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Nature has been powered by the output of that one runaway fusion reactors ever since then. And life here has had to handle the fact that our power supply is available only about half of each day, so each species needs to develop ways of surviving a total failure of the power plant every day.

Speaking of "no, idiot", sunlight IS radiation.As anyone who has ever had a sunburn knows, it's damaging radiation. Quite a bit more damaging than any radiation anyone has ever received from. US nuclear power plant, in fact.

Actually, that's not all that far off from reality. Except that, in our solar system, nature has only one fusion reactor, which went critical roughly 4.5 billion years ago.

Nature also makes its own fission reactors on occasion, through natural processes concentrating fissionable materials [wikipedia.org]. And through other natural processes which turn over portions of the land, some of those materials can become exposed or even distributed across large areas. One would expect this to happen very rarely, but over sufficiently long time scales it may be something which could be expected to happen nonetheless.

Yeah go right ahead and conflate the most wildly unsafe nuclear power plant in the world with all of the others with a secondary containment building. With proper safe design.Go ahead and spread all of your anti nuclear paranoia non sense.While we are at it, why don't we push the disapearance of Air Malasia Flight 370 as an excuse to ground all airliners, eventually leading to shuting down the whole airline industry for good. It's the kind of wisdom the anti nuclear wise man are proposing.

Or how about we get some perspective. Chernobyl nearly bankrupted the USSR, and the cost of Fukushima is looking like it will be in the range of hundreds of billions of Euros/USD. The loss of one airliner doesn't really compare. In fact all their air accidents in the history of the world don't really compare.

How much 9/11 losses caused on the American economy ?Studies place the price tag at 2 trillion USD !Again, then why are we letting the airlines continue to operate ?Can we honestly guarantee a 9/11 style attack will never, ever happen again ?

A Chernobyl style accident is essentially impossible to happen again. It wasn't the first stupid idea coming from Russia, the stupidity continues right now (in other areas). Nukes without secondary containment were a stupid idea only the Russians would be stupid enough

How much 9/11 losses caused on the American economy ?Studies place the price tag at 2 trillion USD !

Very little of that was directly due to the aircraft though, most of it was self-inflicted damage due to the way the US responded.

Nukes without secondary containment were a stupid idea only the Russians would be stupid enough to pursue.

Actually the root cause was exactly the same in the case of both Chernobyl and Fukushima, and most other commercial nuclear accidents. It's not stupidity per-se, it's that safety is expensive. The USSR was building reactors on the cheap, and TEPCO was running them on the cheap. It's not really stupidity, it's simply the reality of trying to run something that is expensive to make

Chenobyl would still be functioning just fine if their management hadn't have forced them to run "emergency drills" by actually causing real-life overloads and not informing workers what was going on...they basically blew themselves up. Japan's reactor would also still be fine if it hadn't been in the path of the tsunami. So the root cause isn't the same...one was from human stupidity, the other was from a natural disaster. I do root cause analysis at my job, be very careful of the built-in bias that eve

Other plants were hit by the tsunami and didn't go into meltdown. TEPCO didn't spend money doing the necessary safety upgrades even when they were told to do so, and their staff were not trained well enough.

Nuclear could be perfectly safe in theory, but in reality human nature makes it dangerous.

I don't agree with your quoted cost for Fukushima cleanup.The pattern so far has been of wildly inflated and some fully made up numbers about Fukushima, so I don't agree with any predictions until they actually materialize.

>Very little of that was directly due to the aircraft though, most of it was self-inflicted damage due to the way the US responded.The same argument can be made that the Fukushima exclusion zone is much larger than necessary and that nuclear power plant remediation procedures are far more costly than necessary. Should we accept that the LNT model is wrong, the real procedures that will have to be undertaken would be reduced by about 75%.

The reality is if the LNT model were right, there would have been about a hundred times more cancers from Chernobyl than actually happened.Remember the prediction of millions of cancer deaths from Chernobyl ?Countries no longer under the influence of Russia that were very close to Chernobyl report very little cancers compared to the dire predictions. So the massive cover up doesn't quite pan out.And there is people living back in the Chernobyl exclusion area, in defiance of the military blockade, people drinking radioactive water.If the LNT model were right, they would have cancers by the buckets, which isn't actually happening.The reality is the only real serious risk in both Chernobyl and Fukushima are Thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine, which has an 8 day half life, so 99.99% is gone in 80 days (10 half lives means 99.99% is gone).Our bodies deal with radiation all the time. We have radioactive Potassium-40 and Carbon-14 in our bodies decaying all the time. We breathe radioactive Radon all the time, cause it seeps from Thorium decay inside the earth.We can avoid fire in order not to get burned.We can't avoid radiation, it's everywhere.

Nuclear is the safest energy source out there, and it doesn't have to be expensive, if we stop with the sensationalism and approach it with responsibility and sobriety.

The cost includes all the compensation and benefits that have to be paid. People who were made unemployed when their jobs disappeared had to go onto welfare. Just today TEPCO agreed to pay the full cost of a load more homes and all the possessions in them that were lost. Even if they could be decontaminated in a reasonable amount of time much of it has decayed over the years, the property and land is worthless and many people have already moved on and can't go back because of work.

The same argument can be made that the Fukushima exclusion zone is much larger than necessary and that nuclear power plant remediation procedures are far more costly than necessary. Should we accept that the LNT model is wrong, the real procedures that will have to be undertaken would be reduced by about 75%.

That plant won a safety award the year before the accident so was not "the most wildly unsafe nuclear power plant in the world".Some of the "nuclear paranoia" had the positive effect of a large number of improvements to places that were potentially even worse. We didn't completely stop using nuclear reactors for civilian purposes in 1986 did we? I think you really are overstating the "nuclear paranoia" to a ridiculous point.

The nuclear paranoia of Fukushima led Germany to stop using nuclear power and switch to coal.The French government has announced highest levels of pollution this week all over France, guess what's the cause: German coal power plants.

No, Germany hurriedly shutdown its oldest nuclear reactors after Fukushima, under the fear of Bavarian Tsunamis and eventual low intensity earthquakes that are non events.Now not only their emissions are up, as well as Germany is even more dependent on Russia, which make them weak in dealing with Mr. Putin's plan to rebuild part of the USSR empire.

Chernobyl had:
No secondary containment structure
A few serious safety risks, which combined with the lack of a secondary containment really made it an accident waiting to happenBoth those bad features had been known for over a decade as a huge safety risk. Only the USSR would dare build a reactor without secondary containment. That is indisputable, and should Chernobyl had a secondary containment, it would have been an accident a little worse than Three Mile Island

Fukushima was an old Gen II reactor. About as old as the oldest operating reactors in the world. That accident would have been impossible in a modern AP1000 since the reactor has passive cooling capabilities, able to go for days without any external power. Besides they had been warned both that its Tsunami defenses were inadequate and that they shouldn't put all diesel generators in the basement.

In both cases it's like trying to use a safety problem of a first generation 737 as a reason not to fly 787's or using a safety problem on a A300 as a reason not to fly A380s.

New nuclear isn't cheap but isn't expensive either. China, India and South Korea are building new reactors on a cost effective basis. There are cheaper solutions that are even safer, with the real problem being that vested nuclear suppliers don't want to invest on something that will give them less revenue.

Nuclear upfront investment is expensive, but nuclear reactors are far cheaper to operate after built even than coal, like 1/3rd the cost.

Even natural gas exploration and distribution kills people every year. Hundreds worldwide. It's just that those deaths are one or two here, one or two there, plus there's no sensationalism about industrial accidents that kill a few people.

Over the last 10 years there was a single nuclear related death in the USA, a uranium mining accident. And if you go back 50 years, there are very few deaths related to nuclear stuff.

France actually produces less total electricity from nuclear than the USA, but its over 75% of their total electricity, also with just a handful of deaths over a long period.

Should just the diesel generators for Fukushima been fine after the Tsunami, it would have been an example of how resilient nuclear can be in the face of extreme accidents.

Generally, yes, but in the fear expressed at Chernobyl is apparently that it will render airborne radioactive particles that are currently sequestered in vegetation, which apparently the natural organic decay process would retain.

The fire "risk" is natures form of healing. By re-distributing the radiation the area can heal.

We humans take issue with the idea of the radiation spreading outside "the zone" but nature doesn't.

But in what patterns does it get redistributed? Does it get diluted down to homeopathic levels thus curing everyone in the Ukraine of cancer, or does it get redistributed in concentrated form, creating pockets of high radiation outside the exclusion zone causing Ukrainians to get superpowers and kick the Russians out of Crimea.

Does it get diluted down to homeopathic levels thus curing everyone in the Ukraine of cancer,

This is ironic, because there is actually a serious scientific hypothesis that small doses of radioactivity are good for you. (In contrast to all other "homeopathic" ideas which are idiocy and/or fraud)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]

But in what patterns does it get redistributed? Does it get diluted down to homeopathic levels thus curing everyone in the Ukraine of cancer, or does it get redistributed in concentrated form, creating pockets of high radiation outside the exclusion zone causing Ukrainians to get superpowers and kick the Russians out of Crimea.

If the latter will they stop with the Russian Federation or will they decide to invade Eastern Europe?

The fire "risk" is natures form of healing. By re-distributing the radiation the area can heal. We humans take issue with the idea of the radiation spreading outside "the zone" but nature doesn't.

We humans also like attributing "intent" to natural systems - like "balance" and "healing" - but nature doesn't.

Nature doesn't "heal", in the same way that it doesn't "hurt". Organisms just do what they do. Their interaction and interrelation - the patterns our human brains identify are just temporary states. Thing are always changing, but they usually change so slowly (ie. we live so briefly), we think we perceive a "system" and call it "nature" and think it somehow cares what happens.

...as I'm worrying right now about Fukushima. At least in Ukraine they aren't pumping sea water to cool it, which afterwards gets dumped in the ocean for further spread via currents - http://borderlessnewsandviews.... [borderless...dviews.com]

At bikini atoll were the USA tested nuclear weapons on ships. The sunken ships pose no radiation hazard. You can swim through them safely.

The island itself is just as bad as chernybol still. As sea water is the natural moderator. The radiation particles get pushed around by the currents. Ideally if we could but a giant glacier over cherynbol by the time it melted most of the radiation would be gone as well.

You can't wish radioactive particles to "be gone". They do have a half-life, but for example the Ce-137 that's depicted in my link has a half-life of ~30 years. And it's spewed continuously into the ocean and spread around the world. The Bikini Atoll experiments resulted in sea-life in general being hundreds of times more radioactive than the norm because those elements, and guess where that radioactivity ended up - on people's tables. Saying it's safe to swim around the sunken ships is interesting to say the least. My point is that radioactive particles don't just "go away" and their generation can overwhelm the moderating capabilities (i.e. dilution) of the sea water. And it isn't reasonable to think that having radioactive material being spewed into the ocean like that is all-right.

And it isn't reasonable to think that having radioactive material being spewed into the ocean like that is all-right.

Nobody said it was "all-right" or "safe", the OP said it was "safer" and AFAIK common-sense plus all the evidence from the various Pacific nuke tests supports that claim. Survival is about risk minimization, no activity is totally safe, there is no efficient way to safely dispose of nuclear waste, especially when it has already escaped into the environment, better to help wash it into the ocean than try to keep it on the beach.

It's safe to swim around sunken fuel rods - you've written it yourself "sea water is the natural moderator".However the bits that come off and could end up in the food chain are a greater worry. Hence encapsulation or incorporation (eg. synroc) of high grade nuclear waste.

I won't believe a word about this, unless the full study is available for checking and has been independently reproduced. And when I write "available" I don't mean "you can purchase this paper for the wee lil' sum of 40 Euros".

Sorry, but just about any time I actually read the papers that articles on slashdot or anywhere else are about, the result is typically quite different in the actual paper or the methods employed have obvious holes like insufficient data. The more politically relevant the topic, the w

Look, I don't want to ruin your cynical train, but the study looks plausible, as in "common sense" plausible. Even if it, of course, needs to be double-checked, there is no reason to "disbelieve" it without giving it the attention it deserves.

What is triggering your "disbelief" alert here? Radioactive material enter the ecosystem via the trees. Trees die, their leaves fall every autumn. Radioactive material goes back to the ground, causes problem with fauna and fungi. Living organisms are known to be able to cope with radioactivity, but at the price of some energy expense to fight mutations (in higher organisms, tumors), which mean they can't spend as much energy as usual to do what they usually do, that is decompose organic matter and generate nutrients back into the cycle of life.

And of course, if a fire starts, all the radioactive material contained into flammable materials (leaves and tree remnants) will soar into the sky, since the decay of the said flammable materials take longer than usual... This again seems plausible.

When the Soviets contaminated over 800 square kilometers [wikipedia.org] with high levels of Strontium 90 in their first big nuclear disaster, post Lysenko geneticists and biologists studied the effects of this radiation on the entire biocoenosis. Z. A. Medvedev wrote about the results of this work in his book, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals (ch.8):

The given contamination levels (1.8-3.4 millicuries per square meter) were highly destructive for soil animals. Predatory beetles suffered least; their numbers in the contaminated area were reduced to only 66 percent of the figure in the control area. Non-predatory beetles, beetle larvae, and other insects that feed on plants (phytophaga) suffered the most; their numbers fell to 56 percent of those in the control area. Soil animals that feed on organic products in the soil (where the highest level of strontium concentration was found)—the saprophages—died out almost completely; their numbers fell to 1 percent of the control group. Taxonomically, the groups studied were Aranea, Mollusca, Lithoblidae, Geophilidae, Lumbricidae, and Diplopoda.

So small critters in the soil that eat leaves are highly sensitive to radioactive contamination. This has been known for a long time now; at least 40 years. Your skepticism is misplaced; that Chernobyl should have caused a big die-out among the creatures the decompose detritus is entirely predictable. Wait a few years and you'll get to read about the same thing around Fukushima, only there we'll learn about the effects on marine life as well.

No, you won't read the same thing around Fukushima, even if the paper is correct, because there has been no release of Strontium-90 to begin with. Mind you, there is some in the cooling water, but not in the fallout. One of the advantages to have an intact, though leaking, containment is that only volatile components can escape from it. Strontium is not among the volatile components, only noble gasses, Iodine and Caesium. You can keep most of the Caesium inside the containment, if you either have a containm

That's not the case. The total radiation released by Fukushima Daiichi is far smaller than Mayak or Chernobyl, but there are concentrations of radiation (from Cs-137 and Cs-134) as high as 30M Bq/m2 [hps.org] in the several kilometers of land Northwest of Fukushima Daiichi. This is equivalent 0.8 millicuries which puts it into the ballpark of the Urals EURT areas of 1.8-3.4 millicuries that were studied by the Soviets; high enough to measurably effect the life cycle of saprophage.

Only one problem, during the terrorist attack the entire building was destroyed by a volcano.

The land around Fukushima Daiichi does not fit your terrorist+volcano analogy. The land and around the plant is foothills and the water did not get far inland. The plant itself was build only after the site had been graded to within ~10m of sea level (which is probably the single biggest mistake implicated in the whole event.) So the surface fallout may be studied just fine.

The sea around Fukushima Daiichi may also be meaningfully studied despite the tsunami. One need only establish control areas that are similar to the Fukushima Daiichi area but well away; kilometers or tens of kilometers north and south of the plant and relatively free of radioactive contaminants. Post tsunami recovery of organisms may then be studied and comparisons between Fukushima Daiichi and these control areas can be made.

FYI: this work has been started and is ongoing. Unlike the Soviet case we won't have to wait decades for the cover-up to finally fail and the results to appear, either. Japanese and Western researchers are eager to publish about Fukushima Daiichi.

We cannot know the truth about something that we are not able to actually read. And slapping an unnecessary 40 Euro bill on an article that is probably less than 40 pages long has exactly that result. It exactly the same as back when people were not deemed fit to read the bible themselves and were instead fed a redacted version of it by priests. You may remember that people had good reason not to be OK with that.

I don't say we cannot know the truth about politicized subjects. What I say is that we cannot kn

I think so. I remember reading in a museum somewhere about a hypothesis that ancient trees didn't decompose... they just kept piling up.

Based on a genetic analysis of mushroom fungi, David Hibbett and colleagues proposed that large quantities of wood were buried during this period because animals and decomposing bacteria had not yet evolved that could effectively digest the tough lignin.

"The scientists took bags of fallen leaves to various areas around Chernobyl and found that locations with more radiation caused the leaves to retain more than half of their original weight after almost a year." I'd certainly be toting my "bag of fallen leaves" if I were in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Of course, I would not be telling people about the where the bag lost some of its original weight. But to be honest, In places with more radiation I would think it would loose more weight. Or am I missin

Let's find out if this is happening at Chernobyl, so we can start using the stuff to pull Cs137 from the environment.

Research probably not likely to get funding by the USG, since there is no military application for that kind of nuclear research.
On the other hand. bioconcentrators of certain uranium isotopes for purpose of bioenrichment, may be of interest to the gov.....

Seems like there's some skepticism over the nature of the study. Somewhat reasonable, but it still seems to add to evidence about the long term effects of the disaster on the ecosystem around Chernobyl. Some comments seem to express skepticism about the importance of decomposition. Perhaps a biologist could go into greater detail on its benefit to life on earth. The suggestion about controlled fires makes me wonder if you read the article.

The problem here is that microbes are among the most resistant things on Earth to radiation damage. And even larger organisms like earthworms or nematodes tend to be pretty resistant as well (though the study alleged to control for that). That's because they are small and have short life-cycles.

What I think is more likely here is that there is a common environmental condition that both inhibits decay and doesn't move radiation away as readily. For example, if the soil is dry, then that will inhibit decay

You're right, I didn't think this through properly. I'd still bank on the microbe side pulling though easily since this is a substantial, ever-present selection pressure (and they've had almost three decades to evolve), not just happening when humans happen to bring UV around. Microbes would have plenty of time (at least tens of thousands of generations IMHO) to pull through and evolve solutions.

Fungi might not though. If it is a radiation-induced impairment of soil organisms, I'd look first at the organ

A similar observation was made at the Palmerton, PA superfund site. The nearby Blue Mountain was the recipient of toxic fumes spewed from a nearby tin processing plant for almost a century. The resultant depositions killed almost all the vegetation on the mountainside, which furthermore, did not decay because of the dearth of micro organism capable of living there.

"...concentrations of cadmium, lead, and zinc in the soil were so high as to prevent regeneration. In fact, metals levels stopped all microbial

Food irradiation, which was foisted on the American public by Bush 1's VP Dan Quayle, with no food labeling required sounds similar. A dose of radiation on our food, prevents it from decaying as quickly.

I had a friend in a startup back in the day who would keep an orange in his desk as a joke, saying that he would know if the produce from store X was nuked or not depending on how rotten that orange would get.